Most people will change the start page to something else - I used to have my IE start page set to Google, but seeing as I only have to type into the start bar and hit down-Enter, I don't bother any more!
Therefore anyone who might want to upgrade to Mozilla 1.01 when it's out might not be told about it, because little mention is made of it anywhere. Wait till there's a security flaw found in 1.0 and then see how quickly it's announced:)
Mozilla's release notes page doesn't mention 1.01, their downloads page doesn't... the only place I've seen it mentioned was in the roadmap graph that someone else linked to higher up in this post.
I forgot to add "Please don't mention Jabber" to my post. For some reason, everyone does.:)
Jabber is a very nice thing, but it doesn't do what I want - which is provide full ICQ2000B+ functionality on Linux. The ICQ transport is a great idea, but I don't want MSN and I don't want Jabber - just ICQ.
While I'm the first to say that monopolies are bad, I like the fact that the OSS community has banded together enough to make something of the scale of Mozilla, instead of being tied up in lots of little sub-projects.
I like the fact that Galeon exists, that K-Meleon exists, that Chimera exists - and because they're all based on Mozilla, they're all as good as each other at rendering web content. If they all started as projects from scratch then none of them would be anywhere _near_ as good as they are now.
Instead of a million ICQ clients out there that implement 80% of the functions, if we had one decent ICQ library that all the clients used, then they could all use that library (Yes, I know there a couple of libs that are getting there - there weren't when I looked a couple of months back.)
I think it's a great thing that there is a standard library (Gecko) for rendering web pages that other projects can implement and build on. While I don't want to suggest the stifling of competition, I don't want to see people wasting time developing an alternative to something that is the best there is, and that they can just grab and use.
With the addition of calendaring, Mozilla is almost in a position to take on the IE/Outlook combination. Who would have suggested that a year ago? Mozilla is more than just another in the sea of browsers.
While we're on the subject, the Mozilla start page at http://www.mozilla.org/start/1.0/ today was telling me to download Mozilla 1.01RC2. I see the value in maintaining "stable" and "unstable" releases, but surely 1.1 should have remained a beta if that was the intention?
Why doesn't Mozilla.org publicise the 1.01 release candidates anywhere?
Those of you who use the tabbed browsing feature in Mozilla (read: almost everyone!) may notice a change in "features" between Mozilla 1.0 and 1.1.
When you have only one tab open, and you instinctively middle-click or Ctrl-W or whatever, your tab bar will disappear - even if you told Mozilla not to hide the tab bar when you only had one window open, with the preferences option.
This behaviour can be considered a feature or a bug - instead of the Close Tab button doing nothing or being disabled when there's one tab, the button now hides the bar. I told Mozilla never to do that! I want the tab bar there at all times!
The bug is at http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=159191 (copy and paste this into a new window, bugzilla doesn't allow links from Slashdot.)
Also, why do tabs now have to close left to right, prey tell? I open Slashdot in my first tab, read everything I want, and read the first page that loads (normally the first tab) and work my way through articles. With this setup, you will just get sent back to Tab 1 every time.
There are a couple of things everyone seems to be overlooking with respect to the Q3 engine.
When you license the Q3 engine, you don't just get what came out for Quake 3: Arena. All the modifications that id made for Team Arena, Return to Castle Wolfenstein (Scripting, camera and effects - someone was complaining about the Q3 engine's AI?) -- they are all included as well. Licensees can also license their updates between each other, if they desire.
Not just anyone can license the Q3 engine. Currently there are around 3 major Q3 engine licensees (Ritual, Activision and EA). "QUAKE III Arena engine licensees are part of an exclusive club that will remain exclusive because we are capping the total number of licensee companies." ( http://www.idsoftware.com/business/home/technology/) And the $250,000 is a minimum payment; the actual cost is a 5% royalty of wholesale price of your game.
If you put out a game with the Q3 engine, it's Instant Publicity. This is in part generated by the above fact, that there are currently less than 10 games that use the Q3 engine, and partly because of the Carmack Factor.
When you license the Q3 engine, you're showing the world you're not a kid developing in your garage. You get a lot with that -- including the problem you can't release your game open-source. But remember id is a game development company, not an engine license company. It just so happens they have one of the best engines there is.
I don't really think id have $ signs in their eyes when they license the engine - thats what Doom 3 is for. The price is set so that not everyone can use it, and they can ensure that titles with their engine are put out by companies that have the means to make a decent game out of them.
I don't know about you, but Mum wants to write letters and she wants to see one word processor, not vim, emacs, AbiWord, OpenOffice Write, Kate, [...]
Remember that Lycoris is a desktop distribution. As far as things go it seems that is the best there is right now. The fact you KNOW that there are multiple word processors (or that Letters To Nana != Microsoft Word) instantly says to me you know enough to install whatever your preference is.
I can't wait till either Gnome/GTK or KDE/Qt are at a stage where either apps from one look completely in place under the other, or one of them is so good that it provides exactly one good everything, and I don't need to use the other one. I think it's important to have both, but I only want to use one at a time.
Now if only data projectors would fall in price. With optical mice these days, you can quite comfortably sit in a nice armchair and look at a wall!
Even better will be those new Tablet PC's where you can disconnect the screen completely if you wish, so it doesn't get in the way of your 60" white sheet display...
Seth Green played Scott Evil in the Austin Powers movies. The author of LORD was Seth Able Robinson.
Re:Could Mozilla beat IE if Netscape can't?
on
Mozilla RC3 Released
·
· Score: 1
You can't deny Mozilla was "based on Netscape" - it looks like Netscape, it has the same components (Navigator/Composer/etc) - sure, it may have been rewritten from the ground up, but that doesn't change the fact that the browser started it's life as Netscape and is still heavily entrenched in that past.
I might have to DL Netscape 4.77 for a laugh, to see how far we've come!
Could Mozilla beat IE if Netscape can't?
on
Mozilla RC3 Released
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
People who started using the Internet before IE don't mind Netscape and would go back for a previous version. Most of the world see IE bundled with Windows, compared Netscape 4.77 with IE5 and say "IE is better", and don't recognize that Netscape could possibly change.
Add one part Mozilla and shake.
The sort of people who would use IE over Netscape because they had a bad experience with Netscape around 4.77 will be impressed with Mozilla, and they don't even need to know that it is based on Netscape! I installed Netscape 7 preview yesterday, which for most people may as well have been a Mozilla skin. Additions: IM, which closes when the browser closes and isn't important in a business environment, and no menu option to remove all those AOL popups.
We don't need to wait for Mozilla 1.0 so Netscape 7 can come out and compete with IE; when Moz hits 1.0, we should be pitting Mozilla against IE. It doesn't feel signifigantly different, but there are improvements that grow on you quickly - tabbed browsing, being able to selectively disable Javascript - which make people stand up and watch. Netscape will have as many ads and links to AOL in it as IE has to Micrsoft. Mozilla is infinitely more pure! And when the last few bugs are ironed out, I'll look forward to seeing what new innovations the crew have in store. (Remember, as far as most people are concerned, all that changed between IE4 and IE6 was the loading logo and the widgets if you're using XP.)
That, and maybe Mozilla could end up being the application that make people think "Wow, that open source community aren't so bad after all."
The concept of a hippocratic oath is important when you consider that surgery is one human life "playing god", or in a strong position of power over another.
How can be there be such a relationship in programming?
There are two ways to look at thist:
a. There are commercial software applications that are going to be used in life threatening applications. Medical software is a growing industry. As soon as someone dies as a result of your medical software, or even when a doctor was using it, expect a lawsuit. The standard threats of legality and fear of punishment are the motivators when writing software for that kind of industry. Therefore, in the commercial world, it is (in the most part, and especially in code with a more serious use than KaZaA) self regulating.
b. Software, being the way that it is, is very easy to modify -- sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. Any kid can take an open source program, hack in their own viral segment, and then release it. While forking isn't that bad a problem in the OSS community, and in some cases is a very good thing, if Windows ever got publically open-sourced I know that hundreds of kids would go through and change every occurence of "Microsoft Windows" to "my l33t h4x0r cl0n3 0s" in the source code. Hell, I hex-edited command.com back in the day for a laugh. But I didn't know enough to do anything but change strings.
That's the clincher - only people that know what they are doing can become a registered medical practitioner, as opposed to any 12 year old who can be a "software programmmer." I propose a simple return to the Internet of a few years back, where you had to be relatively smart, but not a rocket scientist, to get online. There were no "Compile, link and run this downloaded code" buttons in flash IDEs. I hope that the development of Internet2, or whatever it turns out to be, means that we can return to a bit more geek-academic-centric network, instead of an advertising and pr0n festival.
If it wasn't for the kids hacking code that started through a vanity desire, we wouldn't have half the cool technologies OSS has today. You have to put up with the good and the bad, and filter through it. For every Brilliant Digital there will be a Lavasoft protecting us, eventually.
For those who haven't been following the entire debate, when the article was first posted online yesterday Chris Barton suggested that vampires on their 128Kbit connections were downloading "5Gb (gigabytes) a day / 120Gb/month."
Today, it has been corrected. Not annotated, acknowledged or errata'd -- silently replaced.
For the record, I don't find this funny. Sure, if all stories marked "01 April 2002" were april fools day jokes it might be a bit more acceptable. But, I rely on news sites to deliver news, and that is how they built a metric of trust.
I know Slashdot isn't exactly CNN, but surely they could do a little bit more to seperate those which are their stupid april fools day pranks from those which are not.
The University of Waikato and Manakau Institute of Technology (in New Zealand) are developing a system called LIDS (Large Interactive Display Surface.) Basically, a LIDS screen is a large pane of glass in a wooden frame with a Mimio on it. Software has been developed by the Uni for various applications.
The most obviously useful application is lecture capture - the LIDS software hooks into Powerpoint and enables a PPT slideshow to be played as usual, but all the annotations and changes on it can be recorded into the document, along with audio. Someone who didn't go to the lecture can then take this PPT file from the web and play back the entire lecture - changes, the lecture delivery, everything that was said and done.
There are 'meeting support' options in LIDS - you can sit a video camera in front of the screen and it will record a silhouette, which gets broadcasted to other stations running the software; on their screen, they see what you see and they see your silhouette as if you were writing on the same screen.
LIDS is a research project, and isn't aimed commercially yet. Lots of usability testing is happening on various aspects of the system at present, in both CSCW (computer-supported collaborative work) and single user aspects.
The most interesting part of the research has been the development of a new metaphor for computer interaction - LIDS works in real space, where multiple people can use it, and interact with it at the same time.
The project doesn't have a web page, but there have been a number of papers submitted to various conferences. A good overview can be found in a paper by Prof. Mark Apperley and Dr. Masood Masoodian from the CS dept at Waikato, which can be found at this link.
If your client isn't the Waikato Polytech, ring them and ask them. They had a bus a couple years back that had 10-20 computers in it from memory, arranged around the walls. I'm not sure about its power supply, but I think an extension cord from the roof of the bus (perhaps 3-phase)? did the job.
Here in Hamilton, New Zealand there are a handful of proper geek houses I know. Basically, flat rate broadband internet is only becoming affordable now, and a lot of the more popular geek houses have been the ones with large internet pipes to them.
Why I don't want to live in one of these houses:
1) Geek houses are networked and have fast internet. This breeds LANs. Even if you dont plan to have LANs, they happen. People bring their machines around, one of your mates will bring theirs, and when someone else asks your flatmate, they'll say "someone else is here, might as well come over", which soon becomes "Might as well make a LAN of it!" This has lead to dishes go unwashed for a week, "communal" flat food no longer being bought because all the LANners will eat it, and above all - no lounge.
2) I like having a lounge, a place with no geek stuff necessary at all, but good luck finding four geeks to live together and not having computers in the lounge.
3) Studying when your flatmates are urging you to play Quake is impossible.
4) While submitting this, I happened to check on IRC - and guess what sort of conversation I found!
comming to the lan this weekend?
there any places left at the flate ??
yeah there is heaps of room in the shed
or my room
* Accolade will save you a spot novac
heh
5) I've seen chores lists that refer to flatmates as "Trojan, Blitz and RageX" instead of "Daniel, Garet and Andrew". NOT cool.
6) Chicks do not like to live in geek houses. An exception to this has been made in a couple of geek houses in my area - however the chicks are normally romantically involved with one of the geeks. Quality, single chicks do NOT gravitate towards geek houses.
Geek houses are great to go to but they're not cool to live in. They dont always hold flatmates forever, they have almost no privacy because of the people who think they can just wander in and do what they want, and knowing people on IRC is not necessarily a good sign that they're good to live with too.
YMMV of course, but this is what its like over here. A "less geeky" house, one with just UTP between the rooms and a switch somewhere connected to the 'net, is fine by me, and really doesnt need organising.
I agree with everyone who has said that software documents have no little or no bearing on Internet development.
I'm surprised that no-one has gone back and considered Fidonet. It was BBSing that introduced a lot of people to the online concept, and I dont think there was any more important document to the BBSing community than the oft-misinterepreted "Policy 4" in its various incarnations.
It was this document that attempted to organise the network that in a lot of places, the Internet has modelled itself around (in the ideas of information interchange and filtering down from a top via 'nodes') - and this document that angered people enough to the point that there could be no similar such control placed over Usenet/the Internet itself.
Slashdot Mirror
There's also a round throbber with a cool animation
I wasn't going to change from Mozilla to Netscape but - now you tell me there's a new throbber?
GOTTA GET IT!!
Perhaps I should have said "anywhere else".
:)
Most people will change the start page to something else - I used to have my IE start page set to Google, but seeing as I only have to type into the start bar and hit down-Enter, I don't bother any more!
Therefore anyone who might want to upgrade to Mozilla 1.01 when it's out might not be told about it, because little mention is made of it anywhere. Wait till there's a security flaw found in 1.0 and then see how quickly it's announced
Mozilla's release notes page doesn't mention 1.01, their downloads page doesn't... the only place I've seen it mentioned was in the roadmap graph that someone else linked to higher up in this post.
Oops - I was comparing behaviour in Moz 1.01 - this obviously isnt the same as 1.1. ;)
I'd never really thought about it, but how you described it is how I want it to be.
I forgot to add "Please don't mention Jabber" to my post. For some reason, everyone does. :)
Jabber is a very nice thing, but it doesn't do what I want - which is provide full ICQ2000B+ functionality on Linux. The ICQ transport is a great idea, but I don't want MSN and I don't want Jabber - just ICQ.
While I'm the first to say that monopolies are bad, I like the fact that the OSS community has banded together enough to make something of the scale of Mozilla, instead of being tied up in lots of little sub-projects.
I like the fact that Galeon exists, that K-Meleon exists, that Chimera exists - and because they're all based on Mozilla, they're all as good as each other at rendering web content. If they all started as projects from scratch then none of them would be anywhere _near_ as good as they are now.
Instead of a million ICQ clients out there that implement 80% of the functions, if we had one decent ICQ library that all the clients used, then they could all use that library (Yes, I know there a couple of libs that are getting there - there weren't when I looked a couple of months back.)
I think it's a great thing that there is a standard library (Gecko) for rendering web pages that other projects can implement and build on. While I don't want to suggest the stifling of competition, I don't want to see people wasting time developing an alternative to something that is the best there is, and that they can just grab and use.
With the addition of calendaring, Mozilla is almost in a position to take on the IE/Outlook combination. Who would have suggested that a year ago? Mozilla is more than just another in the sea of browsers.
While we're on the subject, the Mozilla start page at http://www.mozilla.org/start/1.0/ today was telling me to download Mozilla 1.01RC2. I see the value in maintaining "stable" and "unstable" releases, but surely 1.1 should have remained a beta if that was the intention?
Why doesn't Mozilla.org publicise the 1.01 release candidates anywhere?
Those of you who use the tabbed browsing feature in Mozilla (read: almost everyone!) may notice a change in "features" between Mozilla 1.0 and 1.1.
1 (copy and paste this into a new window, bugzilla doesn't allow links from Slashdot.)
When you have only one tab open, and you instinctively middle-click or Ctrl-W or whatever, your tab bar will disappear - even if you told Mozilla not to hide the tab bar when you only had one window open, with the preferences option.
This behaviour can be considered a feature or a bug - instead of the Close Tab button doing nothing or being disabled when there's one tab, the button now hides the bar. I told Mozilla never to do that! I want the tab bar there at all times!
The bug is at http://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=15919
Also, why do tabs now have to close left to right, prey tell? I open Slashdot in my first tab, read everything I want, and read the first page that loads (normally the first tab) and work my way through articles. With this setup, you will just get sent back to Tab 1 every time.
There are a couple of things everyone seems to be overlooking with respect to the Q3 engine.
y /) And the $250,000 is a minimum payment; the actual cost is a 5% royalty of wholesale price of your game.
When you license the Q3 engine, you don't just get what came out for Quake 3: Arena. All the modifications that id made for Team Arena, Return to Castle Wolfenstein (Scripting, camera and effects - someone was complaining about the Q3 engine's AI?) -- they are all included as well. Licensees can also license their updates between each other, if they desire.
Not just anyone can license the Q3 engine. Currently there are around 3 major Q3 engine licensees (Ritual, Activision and EA). "QUAKE III Arena engine licensees are part of an exclusive club that will remain exclusive because we are capping the total number of licensee companies." ( http://www.idsoftware.com/business/home/technolog
If you put out a game with the Q3 engine, it's Instant Publicity. This is in part generated by the above fact, that there are currently less than 10 games that use the Q3 engine, and partly because of the Carmack Factor.
When you license the Q3 engine, you're showing the world you're not a kid developing in your garage. You get a lot with that -- including the problem you can't release your game open-source. But remember id is a game development company, not an engine license company. It just so happens they have one of the best engines there is.
I don't really think id have $ signs in their eyes when they license the engine - thats what Doom 3 is for. The price is set so that not everyone can use it, and they can ensure that titles with their engine are put out by companies that have the means to make a decent game out of them.
I don't know about you, but Mum wants to write letters and she wants to see one word processor, not vim, emacs, AbiWord, OpenOffice Write, Kate, [...]
Remember that Lycoris is a desktop distribution. As far as things go it seems that is the best there is right now. The fact you KNOW that there are multiple word processors (or that Letters To Nana != Microsoft Word) instantly says to me you know enough to install whatever your preference is.
I can't wait till either Gnome/GTK or KDE/Qt are at a stage where either apps from one look completely in place under the other, or one of them is so good that it provides exactly one good everything, and I don't need to use the other one. I think it's important to have both, but I only want to use one at a time.
Now if only data projectors would fall in price. With optical mice these days, you can quite comfortably sit in a nice armchair and look at a wall!
Even better will be those new Tablet PC's where you can disconnect the screen completely if you wish, so it doesn't get in the way of your 60" white sheet display...
Seth Green played Scott Evil in the Austin Powers movies. The author of LORD was Seth Able Robinson.
You can't deny Mozilla was "based on Netscape" - it looks like Netscape, it has the same components (Navigator/Composer/etc) - sure, it may have been rewritten from the ground up, but that doesn't change the fact that the browser started it's life as Netscape and is still heavily entrenched in that past.
I might have to DL Netscape 4.77 for a laugh, to see how far we've come!
People who started using the Internet before IE don't mind Netscape and would go back for a previous version. Most of the world see IE bundled with Windows, compared Netscape 4.77 with IE5 and say "IE is better", and don't recognize that Netscape could possibly change.
Add one part Mozilla and shake.
The sort of people who would use IE over Netscape because they had a bad experience with Netscape around 4.77 will be impressed with Mozilla, and they don't even need to know that it is based on Netscape! I installed Netscape 7 preview yesterday, which for most people may as well have been a Mozilla skin. Additions: IM, which closes when the browser closes and isn't important in a business environment, and no menu option to remove all those AOL popups.
We don't need to wait for Mozilla 1.0 so Netscape 7 can come out and compete with IE; when Moz hits 1.0, we should be pitting Mozilla against IE. It doesn't feel signifigantly different, but there are improvements that grow on you quickly - tabbed browsing, being able to selectively disable Javascript - which make people stand up and watch. Netscape will have as many ads and links to AOL in it as IE has to Micrsoft. Mozilla is infinitely more pure! And when the last few bugs are ironed out, I'll look forward to seeing what new innovations the crew have in store. (Remember, as far as most people are concerned, all that changed between IE4 and IE6 was the loading logo and the widgets if you're using XP.)
That, and maybe Mozilla could end up being the application that make people think "Wow, that open source community aren't so bad after all."
The concept of a hippocratic oath is important when you consider that surgery is one human life "playing god", or in a strong position of power over another. How can be there be such a relationship in programming?
There are two ways to look at thist:
a. There are commercial software applications that are going to be used in life threatening applications. Medical software is a growing industry. As soon as someone dies as a result of your medical software, or even when a doctor was using it, expect a lawsuit. The standard threats of legality and fear of punishment are the motivators when writing software for that kind of industry. Therefore, in the commercial world, it is (in the most part, and especially in code with a more serious use than KaZaA) self regulating.
b. Software, being the way that it is, is very easy to modify -- sometimes for better, sometimes for worse. Any kid can take an open source program, hack in their own viral segment, and then release it. While forking isn't that bad a problem in the OSS community, and in some cases is a very good thing, if Windows ever got publically open-sourced I know that hundreds of kids would go through and change every occurence of "Microsoft Windows" to "my l33t h4x0r cl0n3 0s" in the source code. Hell, I hex-edited command.com back in the day for a laugh. But I didn't know enough to do anything but change strings.
That's the clincher - only people that know what they are doing can become a registered medical practitioner, as opposed to any 12 year old who can be a "software programmmer." I propose a simple return to the Internet of a few years back, where you had to be relatively smart, but not a rocket scientist, to get online. There were no "Compile, link and run this downloaded code" buttons in flash IDEs. I hope that the development of Internet2, or whatever it turns out to be, means that we can return to a bit more geek-academic-centric network, instead of an advertising and pr0n festival.
If it wasn't for the kids hacking code that started through a vanity desire, we wouldn't have half the cool technologies OSS has today. You have to put up with the good and the bad, and filter through it. For every Brilliant Digital there will be a Lavasoft protecting us, eventually.
Telecom own the local loop. They are our spun-off-from-the-Government telco. We have no choice.
For those who haven't been following the entire debate, when the article was first posted online yesterday Chris Barton suggested that vampires on their 128Kbit connections were downloading "5Gb (gigabytes) a day / 120Gb/month."
Today, it has been corrected. Not annotated, acknowledged or errata'd -- silently replaced.
Telecom sell a 128Kbit DSL line to residential customers only, at a net cost of $70 a month.
A 128Kbit DDS for business usage - well, I'm not 100% sure, but a quick ask-around suggested up to $1000.
That is why you are not allowed to run servers on a Jetstart connection.
And so it begins again!
For the record, I don't find this funny. Sure, if all stories marked "01 April 2002" were april fools day jokes it might be a bit more acceptable. But, I rely on news sites to deliver news, and that is how they built a metric of trust.
I know Slashdot isn't exactly CNN, but surely they could do a little bit more to seperate those which are their stupid april fools day pranks from those which are not.
The University of Waikato and Manakau Institute of Technology (in New Zealand) are developing a system called LIDS (Large Interactive Display Surface.) Basically, a LIDS screen is a large pane of glass in a wooden frame with a Mimio on it. Software has been developed by the Uni for various applications.
The most obviously useful application is lecture capture - the LIDS software hooks into Powerpoint and enables a PPT slideshow to be played as usual, but all the annotations and changes on it can be recorded into the document, along with audio. Someone who didn't go to the lecture can then take this PPT file from the web and play back the entire lecture - changes, the lecture delivery, everything that was said and done.
There are 'meeting support' options in LIDS - you can sit a video camera in front of the screen and it will record a silhouette, which gets broadcasted to other stations running the software; on their screen, they see what you see and they see your silhouette as if you were writing on the same screen.
LIDS is a research project, and isn't aimed commercially yet. Lots of usability testing is happening on various aspects of the system at present, in both CSCW (computer-supported collaborative work) and single user aspects.
The most interesting part of the research has been the development of a new metaphor for computer interaction - LIDS works in real space, where multiple people can use it, and interact with it at the same time.
The project doesn't have a web page, but there have been a number of papers submitted to various conferences. A good overview can be found in a paper by Prof. Mark Apperley and Dr. Masood Masoodian from the CS dept at Waikato, which can be found at this link.
I see you're also in NZ...
If your client isn't the Waikato Polytech, ring them and ask them. They had a bus a couple years back that had 10-20 computers in it from memory, arranged around the walls. I'm not sure about its power supply, but I think an extension cord from the roof of the bus (perhaps 3-phase)? did the job.
Here in Hamilton, New Zealand there are a handful of proper geek houses I know. Basically, flat rate broadband internet is only becoming affordable now, and a lot of the more popular geek houses have been the ones with large internet pipes to them. Why I don't want to live in one of these houses: 1) Geek houses are networked and have fast internet. This breeds LANs. Even if you dont plan to have LANs, they happen. People bring their machines around, one of your mates will bring theirs, and when someone else asks your flatmate, they'll say "someone else is here, might as well come over", which soon becomes "Might as well make a LAN of it!" This has lead to dishes go unwashed for a week, "communal" flat food no longer being bought because all the LANners will eat it, and above all - no lounge. 2) I like having a lounge, a place with no geek stuff necessary at all, but good luck finding four geeks to live together and not having computers in the lounge. 3) Studying when your flatmates are urging you to play Quake is impossible. 4) While submitting this, I happened to check on IRC - and guess what sort of conversation I found! comming to the lan this weekend? there any places left at the flate ?? yeah there is heaps of room in the shed or my room * Accolade will save you a spot novac heh 5) I've seen chores lists that refer to flatmates as "Trojan, Blitz and RageX" instead of "Daniel, Garet and Andrew". NOT cool. 6) Chicks do not like to live in geek houses. An exception to this has been made in a couple of geek houses in my area - however the chicks are normally romantically involved with one of the geeks. Quality, single chicks do NOT gravitate towards geek houses. Geek houses are great to go to but they're not cool to live in. They dont always hold flatmates forever, they have almost no privacy because of the people who think they can just wander in and do what they want, and knowing people on IRC is not necessarily a good sign that they're good to live with too. YMMV of course, but this is what its like over here. A "less geeky" house, one with just UTP between the rooms and a switch somewhere connected to the 'net, is fine by me, and really doesnt need organising.
I agree with everyone who has said that software documents have no little or no bearing on Internet development.
I'm surprised that no-one has gone back and considered Fidonet. It was BBSing that introduced a lot of people to the online concept, and I dont think there was any more important document to the BBSing community than the oft-misinterepreted "Policy 4" in its various incarnations.
It was this document that attempted to organise the network that in a lot of places, the Internet has modelled itself around (in the ideas of information interchange and filtering down from a top via 'nodes') - and this document that angered people enough to the point that there could be no similar such control placed over Usenet/the Internet itself.
Craig